‘Escape Mutant’ Coronavirus Strain Concerns CA Scientist: Report

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A leading California infectious disease expert is among a growing number of scientists expressing concerns that a mutated version of the coronavirus might elude the protection conferred by vaccines, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

Dr. Charles Chiu, the director of viral diagnostics at UCSF, said lab studies indicate the mutated strain first found in South Africa may limit the efficacy of vaccines to some degree, the report said.

Chiu’s comment was made in the context of him making an urgent call to speed up the pace of vaccinations amid the spread of three variants believed to be significantly more contagious although not more virulent than the strain that’s currently dominant in the United States. The United Kingdom and Brazil variants are the others.

The Golden State’s vaccine rollout is off to a rocky start, with more than two-thirds of the doses delivered still sitting in storage as of Wednesday according to the report.

The South African strain is called an “escape mutant” because scientists believe it could have the ability to fly below the radar of antibodies generated by vaccines that protect against the virus, CNN reports.

Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute, told CNN: “I’m worried.”

Penny Moore, an associate professor at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, expressed concerns too.

"We fear this mutation might have an impact, and what we don't know is the extent of the impact," she told the cable news outlet.

Scientists are not unanimous in their view of the ability of vaccines to defend against the South African variant.

An infectious disease expert at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, which played a key role in identifying the South African variant, told Reuters there’s no indication we need to hit the panic button just yet.

Richard Lessells told Reuters “many of the vaccines — they are thought to induce quite a broad immune response.”

“That’s why we think that although these mutations may have some effect, they are very unlikely to completely negate the effect of the vaccines.”

Chiu, the UCSF director of viral diagnostics, said an accelerated vaccination rollout is especially urgent amid the emergence of more contagious variants at a time when California has become the world’s coronavirus epicenter, The Chronicle reports.

The Golden State has experienced 5,700 coronavirus-related deaths through the first 14 days of 2021, according to the report.

The coronavirus has killed 32,343 Californians as of Friday afternoon, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

“We’re really in a race now, and this only increases our urgency to mass vaccinate the population before additional variants evolve and emerge,” Chiu said.

Read more at The San Francisco Chronicle